Possibility of the existence of the Congolese giant spider

Originally posted by ImaginaryReality1984
reply to post by twentythreedom

 

Insects are one of the most nutriient dense foods around. In fact the human race could drastically reduce the amount of land we need to farm if we ate insects instead of cows, they would produce less pollution as well along with being healthier than most meats.

I agree 100%. Even cocroaches farmed hygenically are edible and nutritious. I recently posted about eating worms and the ease with which they can be produced in large quantities and did you know midges, that's what we call them in Scotland anway, can be made into an extremely tasty protein burger?
The absence of insects in our diet is a pretty western thing though. Most of the rest of the world eats them.

Originally posted by Arkady
I agree 100%. Even cocroaches farmed hygenically are edible and nutritious. I recently posted about eating worms and the ease with which they can be produced in large quantities and did you know midges, that's what we call them in Scotland anway, can be made into an extremely tasty protein burger?
The absence of insects in our diet is a pretty western thing though. Most of the rest of the world eats them.

I'm from England so i know what scots call midges, those annoying little things (the insects are annoying i mean not the scots ).

In many countries the vast swarms of flies that used to cause trouble were turned into food, Africa in various regions had massive influxes of flies and it was turned into to a seasonal meal. I'm not sure i would be up for regular cockroaches, simply because they are not the most energy efficient thing to raise (lots of wasted calories in the exoskeleton) and i imagine the texture leaves much to be desired.

But yeah think how many calories are wasted to create that hard exoskeleton when compared to grasshoppers, crickets or even worms.

Still it's a pipe dream, the public are generally to squemish for such a thing. I mean people have a go at me for eating squirrel and rabbit because they're cute, what chance do we have of convincing them that insects are the way forward?

reply to post by Morningglory


ya but my runoff caves are man made unfortunately.

I have fought the war against all spiders for centuries...it is a long and brutal war...but just. It appears that I have finally found a worthy adversary in this eternal conflict. I must defeat it.

reply to post by Big Raging Loner


hey thanks for the star! i don't like to kill things either.

i've had 2 other encounters with these guys.

this one was in my house next to the bedroom. not a chance in the world

he was getting away, i don't mind them if they are not in my space and unfortunately, i get to draw those boundries.

he actually charged me when i looked for him under the sink! lol, wish i had the camcorder!

just seen your msgs but cant reply as havent posted more than 20x yet. so you know i'm not ignoring you.

reply to post by Tribble


The biggest spiders on record have a 12 inch leg span. Yet you have stumbled upon a spider that measures half a foot larger? I had a cabin in that area. I spent every summer there as a kid hiking around and exploring the area, I never saw a spider larger than my fingers. Keep in mind I had smaller hands back then. In short, I doubt the spider you saw was that large.

Also, the current "spiders" we think of could not get to be 4-5 feet because of their respiratory systems are inefficient. They have book lungs, tracheal systems, spiracles, and hemocyanin. Not as efficient as our mode of respiration. To those who say the rainforest has more O2, WALLACE S. BROECKER, Ph.D., Newberry Professor of Geology at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, states that "ants, termites, bacteria, and fungi eat nearly the entire photosynthetic O2 product."

reply to post by Big Raging Loner


Anything is possible. What do we REALLY know for certain about remote areas of the planet? Check out these pics of giant snakes...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by Big Raging Loner


Well let me start off this reply by stating for the record that I'm the proud keeper of seventeen separate tarantulas of varying species. I love spiders. The thought of one five feet across makes me grin ear to ear and start mentally designing some for of leash set up so I can take one for a walk. It also makes my dear little Malice (a Salmon Pink Bird Eater AKA Lasiodora Parahybana) at her paltry eleven inches seem tiny. Poor girl.

That being said, it is sadly rather impossible. Given the set up of a tarantulas lungs, they are incapable of growing much bigger than they already are. Back in the days before there were dinosaurs, there were in fact spiders the size of dogs. This was because the oxygen content of our atmosphere was so much vastly higher at that point, thus allowing their somewhat "primitive" book lungs to breath much easier. More modern spiders (bear in mind, tarantulas are MUCH older and considered more "primitive") have a more advanced system of breathing involving a wonderful trachea/book lung combo.

The problems with breathing having been stated, we must also consider the lovely exoskeleton of everyone's favourite arthropods. The reason that none of those Giant Bug Movies could ever happen is, at a certain size, an exoskeleton would collapse under its own weight. This was no doubt one of the many things the precipitated the rise of giant bloody lizards, the fact that they kept all their bones inside their body. A bloody good thing they were able to grow so big, otherwise the spider's would've eaten them all!

It would be difficult to detect. Grabs its foood,then returns to the inner web.

Originally posted by vietmanx
reply to post by Tribble

 

The biggest spiders on record have a 12 inch leg span. Yet you have stumbled upon a spider that measures half a foot larger? I had a cabin in that area. I spent every summer there as a kid hiking around and exploring the area, I never saw a spider larger than my fingers. Keep in mind I had smaller hands back then. In short, I doubt the spider you saw was that large.

Also, the current "spiders" we think of could not get to be 4-5 feet because of their respiratory systems are inefficient. They have book lungs, tracheal systems, spiracles, and hemocyanin. Not as efficient as our mode of respiration. To those who say the rainforest has more O2, WALLACE S. BROECKER, Ph.D., Newberry Professor of Geology at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, states that "ants, termites, bacteria, and fungi eat nearly the entire photosynthetic O2 product."

"I think they could find a 3 to 5 foot spider in the Congo only because of my experience at the Mokelumne River in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Hiking along the river with my German Sheppard, who would bark when he found a (spider or tarantula) I don't know. They were 15 to 18 inches wide. When alerted by my dog I would get a piece of shale and smash these spiders as to continue on the path. They were black and had legs a half inch wide. They were very aggressive and as I was about to throw a slab of shale on one, it jumped from 4 to 6 feet away and landed on my chest. I didn't get bit but at that point I turned back.

So my point is if they could evolve to that size in an average wooded area in California, I think the Congo could produce larger ones"

I was checking my year old inbox and found your reply- your one and only reply!
You are vastly more knowledgeable than I am about spiders, so...
Seems like I need to go back there/ or you could float down to the area, and take pics. and or bring one back.

My brother witnessed these spiders and would be my only witness. They were larger than a paper plate as they stood, and could jump chest high.

It has been 35 years now- I'm sure they're still there.
If your still around ATS I could tell exactly where they are.

reply to post by this_is_who_we_are


The camel spider is the most deadly spider in the world; found mainly in Afghanistan region I think

reply to post by Tribble


Perhaps in the Congo, they may confuse such a large spider to one of the larger stick insect family?

This went viral about a year ago photographed in a back yard in Australia:

Originally posted by bluemirage5
reply to post by this_is_who_we_are

 

The camel spider is the most deadly spider in the world; found mainly in Afghanistan region I think

The camel spider is completely harmless. It doesn´t even have venom. It is also not a true spider, belongs to a different arachnid group.
They are actually found in North America too and they can and do bite when harassed (they have some of the most powerful jaws among invertebrates) but they are not deadly or dangerous to humans at all.

Damn urban legends just won´t die!

The deadliest spider in the world is probably the Sydney funnelweb spider Atrax robustus, or the Brazilian wandering spider. The black widow may have a stronger venom but it injects a very small quantity and is not as aggressive as the former two.

Bugs are getting bigger, but a bug the size of the one in the picture from the article would suffocate.
Bugs relative sizes are directly proportional to the amount of oxygen in the air.
The more air the bigger they grow.

That's because most bugs breath through osmosis, they don't actually have muscular lungs.
Even the spider with it's book lungs to help move more oxygen are still dependent on the amount of oxygen in the air.

That's also why sea creatures get bigger when there is more oxygen in the air, the more oxygen in the air the more oxygen in the water which supports larger creatures.

I believe in the possibility of many a cryptids, but big bugs aren't possible according to their physiology.
Unless of course the cryptid bugs have a different oxygen exchange system.

There have been larger bugs in our past, and even now if you go to the sub tropics and tropics where there is more oxygen the same species will be larger.

It's just not a possibility given our current oxygen levels.

Arthropods can grow large enough. If they have, of course, the right conditions for this. So one really huge spider would not surprise me.

a reply to: thegodoftears



So if i put a spider in a lab and provide the right conditions it will reach a huge size and be suitable as a mount yes?how i miss dnd

On a side note deny ignorance.the fables of third world countries dont cut it.there are no giant spiders of that size living there.simple

originally posted by: epitaph.one


I forget where I read it, but spiders can grow as large as their environment allows them to. I know this doesnt counter-act your point about exoskeletons being inefficient over said size but...who knows.

I do know ive seen a "wolf spider"...you know those small, white black and grey furry ones that jump on their prey. They are always around in the summer. Ive seen one in a greenhouse that was the size of a golfball, no joke.

Given the perfect environment and right conditions any organism can grow to monstrous sizes.

I've seen wolf spiders with leg spans of two golf balls. I've also found black widows living inside abandoned tobacco barns the size of your palm. No BS...the size of your palm. They were massive. I found a South American Goliath bird eater in the Amazon and it is the stuff nightmares are made from. It was almost 1 foot long. I've come across hordes of banana spiders in Colombia that made your skin crawl. Witnessed hundreds of migrating desert tarantulas in California that defied reasoning. Yes, desert tarantulas migrate. In long lines of 15-20 just strolling across the ground. Creepy. The most alien spiders I have ever encountered were the camel spiders in the Middle East. Damn those things gave me the creeps.

I almost fell onto one of the most beautiful spiders I've ever seen while in the Panamanian rain forest. It was a uniformly bright (almost glowing) fluorescent yellow. It was the size of my hand and was pulling a perfectly white egg sack behind it. Gave me the heebie jeebies just thinking about how many hundreds more of those would be born and crawling around the jungle with me.

I've read many times over the years that 99.9% of all life that has lived on this planet is extinct. That's pretty amazing when you think of the current volume of life on Earth. We've supposedly gone through 5 major extinctions and the majority of biologist think we are presently in a 6th major extinction right now. Life is amazing. 5 major extinctions, 99.9% of all life has already gone extinct and yet this planet THRIVES with biodiversity.

Hell yeah there are monsters all over this planet we have yet to uncover.

People keep on saying that a large spider would suffocate due to the low 02 content. What are they basing this on? As far as I know insects breath through a sort of reverse radiator system. The have slits which air flows through. Blood also flows through the slits and becomes oxygenated in the process. There isn't any mechanical process involved, like pumping of the lungs to draw in oxygen, so instead they rely on air pressure to circulate the available oxygen. I guessing that this limits the efficiency of their lungs to only be able to be able to process a certain amount of oxygen per second. Larger spiders, like tarantulas, can grow larger because they have multiple lungs. If that's the case, why can't we have spiders with more lungs that can grow even larger? Or spiders that have developed gastric sacks that pump oxygen with leg movements. Or spiders with double chambered hearts? Spiders have such a vast variety of species because they have an incredible simple template to evolve from.

ED: reverse radiator was not the word I was searching for. Carburetor is a more fitting description.